Dabbling In The Dew: A Song History

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"Dabbling in the Dew" is an English courting song in which a young man quizzes a milkmaid on her way to work; it is Roud 298, and the Traditional Ballad Index files it as "Rolling in the Dew (The Milkmaid)," tracing it in England, Scotland, Canada and several regions of the United States.[1] The index suspects that many versions, including some printed for young readers, have been cleaned up so that the seduction disappears.[1] It gives an earliest date of 1842, attributed to Halliwell by way of Kennedy's Folksongs of Britain and Ireland, but its editor suspects that date really belongs to a related nursery rhyme rather than to this song.[1]

Engraving of a milkmaid with a pail and a farmhand with cows beside a fence

Lucas van Leyden, The Milkmaid, engraving, 1510. Shown for its subject; it has no connection to the song.

Cecil Sharp took down a version from John Swain at Donyatt, Somerset, on Christmas Day 1904; judging the singer's words unfit to print, he published instead a text rewritten by Marson in Folk Songs from Somerset (1905), keeping only the first verse and the refrain.[2] In One Hundred English Folksongs (1916) Sharp called it a favorite throughout England, of which he had noted many variants, and observed that the tune is in the Aeolian mode.[2] Other collectors found it too: George Butterworth in Sussex, Ralph Vaughan Williams in Cambridgeshire and Herefordshire, and Sabine Baring-Gould's collection holds a version from James Parsons of Lewdown.[3]

Shirley Collins recorded it with her own autoharp accompaniment for Peter Kennedy on the HMV album Folksong Today in 1955, and Jean Ritchie included it on her Flying Fish album The Most Dulcimer (1984), recalling that her older sisters learned it at Kentucky's Pine Mountain Settlement School in the 1920s.[3] Aubrey Atwater includes it in Song By Song, Vol. I, a book of old-time favorites for mountain dulcimer, banjo, whistle, guitar and voice, where it appears in the mountain dulcimer section.[4]

Our book that contains the song "Dabbling In The Dew"

Sources

  1. Traditional Ballad Index: "Rolling in the Dew (The Milkmaid)".
  2. Folkinfo (Mainly Norfolk): "Dabbling in the Dew [Rolling in the Dew]".
  3. Mainly Norfolk: "Dabbling in the Dew".
  4. Aubrey Atwater: "Song By Song, Vol. I".
  5. Image: Lucas van Leyden, The Milkmaid, engraving, 1510. The Metropolitan Museum of Art.

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